If the health law falls, what's next?

The Supreme Court has yet to rule on President Barack Obama’s health care law, but court watchers already are handicapping the domino effect if it falls.

If the justices knock out key parts of the law or bring down the whole thing, the reverberations could be felt across the legal landscape for generations to come, radically reining in the scope of federal power, according to supporters of the law and others who closely track the high court.

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And if the justices decide the individual mandate is a constitutional overreach, these observers say, federal labor and environmental laws could be the next on the firing line.

No one knows precisely what’s going to happen to the health law. But during three days of dramatic hearings last week, conservative justices signaled they are deeply skeptical of the individual mandate, a pillar of the law that requires nearly all Americans to buy health insurance or pay a fine. And if that goes down, the conservatives didn’t seem much more enthusiastic about upholding the rest of the law or its expansion of Medicaid.

“A decision in the challengers’ favor … would lead to probably an array of attacks on different parts of the federal regulatory state because for the first time, you have five justices who are going to take very seriously limits on Congressional power,” Tom Goldstein, publisher of SCOTUSblog, said at a POLITICO Pro briefing just before last week’s oral arguments.

“And so, a lot of things that Congress does that maybe framers of the Constitution would have thought are beyond what the true regulation of interstate commerce is — but which the modern Supreme Court has blessed — would be back on the table,” Goldstein added.

Neal Katyal, who argued the health law case in lower courts as acting solicitor general, said at the same event that a ruling against the law “would be a change in the philosophy of the court that would have untold repercussions for the future. No Supreme Court, at least since the 1930s, has taken such an aggressive step.”

Mark Tushnet, a Harvard law professor who has written in favor of the law’s constitutionality, predicted that if the justices do strike down some or all of it, they’ll try to limit the ripple effect of the decision as much as possible. But he strongly doubts the majority would assert their decision applies only to this case, as the court’s unsigned majority opinion did in Bush v. Gore. In that seismic case deciding the 2000 presidential election, five conservatives said their ruling was “limited to the present circumstances.”

That caveat drew widespread mockery from legal experts of various ideologies, who accused the justices of not having the guts to stand behind the consequences of their decision.

“They’re not going to say that this time, that’s for sure,” Tushnet said in an interview. “They know how stupid they looked then.”